U.S. regulators signaled a friendlier future for crypto, emphasizing innovation, privacy, and individual empowerment as the SEC outlined potential regulatory paths that could reshape digital assets and limit surveillance-heavy oversight.

Coinbase-backed Base App launches globally, rolling out a social-first crypto platform that blends trading, payments and earning into a single onchain experience designed to push blockchain tools to mainstream users across more than 140 countries.

SEC staff guidance clarifies how existing securities laws apply to crypto assets, detailing custody, capital, trading, and recordkeeping expectations while signaling flexibility for broker-dealers and market infrastructure handling bitcoin, ether, and other digital assets.

Over the past year, application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology has advanced substantially, and this month, Shenzhen, China-based MicroBT introduced its newest mining machine, boasting an unprecedented hashrate of 1,035 terahash per second (TH/s), equivalent to 1.35 petahash per second (PH/s) of raw computing power.

Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, warned that a broad market downturn may be approaching in 2026, arguing that stretched valuations, falling crypto prices, and deflationary pressures are flashing familiar pre-crisis signals.

Fold has secured nationwide consumer bitcoin access in the United States through a single federally supervised trust framework, following a partnership tied to Bitgo Bank & Trust’s newly granted Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) charter.

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The cryptocurrency rallied momentarily Thursday morning before dropping back to $85K later in the day.

Intercontinental Exchange Inc., also known as ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), is reportedly in talks to invest in crypto payments firm Moonpay Inc. as part of a funding round that would value the company at about $5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg.

While meme coins were all the rage at the start of 2025, the party didn’t last, and the sector has since watched more than $86 billion evaporate since then. In the past 24 hours alone, the laughable coin category slid another 2.7%, and over the week, eight of the top ten meme coins logged decent losses.

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Coinbase enters a new era as it rolls out stock trading and prediction markets alongside futures, tokenization infrastructure, Base App expansion, AI-powered advisory tools, and broader payments and stablecoin upgrades inside a single global financial platform.

Federal Reserve scraps crypto-specific bank rules, replacing them with a principles-based framework that eases regulatory friction, expands flexibility for state member banks, and reopens pathways for crypto custody, payments, and tokenization.

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Bitcoin’s been in a mood lately—dipping, bouncing, and teasing chartists with every candle. Hovering just below $88,000 on Thursday morning around 8:30 a.m. EST, the king of crypto seems caught in a flirtation between bears reluctant to let go and bulls trying to gather their courage.